In 8/36 I described how planning my suicide at the age of 13 had been interrupted by an orange glowing light suddenly shining out through everything around me, my hands included. This experience had convinced me there was something worth living for, but that such beauty as this must be screened out most of the time by my brain’s way of focusing on the world. In this post I describe how on another occasion that same light came flooding through my inner being.
This story continues from the end of my previous post in this series, 13/36 where I wrote about overcoming evil choice with the presence of the love of God. I introduced there how my mother’s deeply grieving Belgian grandmother, a noted local clairvoyant in Ghent after the First World War, chose to magnify and fix grief in others by casting a curse on my mother and her offspring for leaving her and moving to England to marry after the Second World War. I have said before that I do not need to go into details of how troubled our family life was, but I was deeply disturbed inside while maintaining an outward appearance (I had thought) of normality by a strong wit and intelligence with a sense of humour to distract others and cover over the painful and lonely bits.
The context of the event
As junior hospital doctors, Marian and I had become partners after both of our first marriages had broken under the pressures of long medical hours. We had decided we wanted to explore Christian churches together as a basis for our future. We settled in a Pentecostal Church that allowed the Holy Spirit to be expressed in the meetings, because the various religious experiences I had been having seemed misunderstood and not welcomed in more traditional churches. This was at a time when the charismatic movement was challenging many traditions, and inspiring people to make their spirituality a feature of their everyday and professional lives. A doctor from Reading was speaking in Plymouth about the remarkable transformations he had seen when his patients had welcomed a prayerful blessing against fear in their lives. He told one story that was particularly memorable, and which inspired Marian and I after that event to meet regularly with three other healthcare professionals to explore the relevance for ourselves. A young women in her twenties had had a congenital heart problem that had been fully investigated, and she had been booked for open heart surgery in Bristol. She was very fearful about the op, and welcomed the offer of prayer. The GP reported that, while praying, the words had simply slipped out that she would go to Bristol wholeheartedly… When she arrived there she had a routine pre-operative chest X-ray, and the staff were surprised to see a normal heart outline. She was again fully investigated, and found to have a normal heart! Medical investigations had confirmed an inexplicable, miraculous physical change. When asked later, she had said she felt only a gentle frizzle go through her during the prayer.
This was in the late 1970s. I knew that the work of Albert Einstein and many others was forcing a rethink of the nature of matter, not as solid particles, but no one was clear how the local was connected into the infinite. This enabled the scientist in me to be open to the possibility that strange things can happen unexpectedly, as other events in our lives went on to confirm. Our small group of five met fortnightly to explore and discuss and pray for inspiration and guidance.
The infilling event
During these meetings, it became progressively clearer that I was experiencing some inner conflict and disturbance about Bible reading, and during church services. They knew about my long ‘seeking after truth’ spiritual search, and how this had included occultism. They also were well informed about ‘generational soul ties’. I accepted the offer made by the leader of our small group to receive prayer from the group to cut any soul ties. A most remarkable thing happened. As we settled into a peaceful prayer in silence and then with a few words from the leader, I saw a black shape emerge forwards from my chest. This may strike you as farcical, but Marian saw it too and affirms what I saw. It was shaped like a bat. It went up and put itself in a top corner of the room to avoid the prayer, but a cord connected it to my chest. At that moment, Hugh, the leader, prayed very calmly and gently that Christ cut any soul ties. Instantly, the cord snapped, the thing disappeared, and I was flooded with the most beautiful sensation I have ever experienced. I liken it to liquid gold flooding me. I was utterly fulfilled with joy and uplifted. The whole episode was bathed in peace.
The consequences
I shall only mention two, but there were many subtle changes in the quality of my life with their obvious impact on Marian and more widely. Part of my earlier inner disturbance had been an irrational fear of knives, sometimes waking from sleep anxious and questioning if I had stabbed someone during the night. I had also been subject to irrational outbursts of murderous anger, which I had always contained with a mental struggle, but moments of road rage were particularly scary. All of these never once occurred again after that deliverance from the soul tie.
The transfiguration of my life with a sense of freedom and ‘reasonableness’ was so marked that I decided I needed to find an opportunity to talk with my mother about it, as the intuition came sometime before it that someone in her family was causing trouble. Having moved 250 miles away from the home to escape the tensions there, this would not be an easy task. It was a number of years later, in fact, when she was convalescent in hospital from an operation and I had travelled back to see her. In one sense her defences were down in that condition of tiredness post-operatively, but also there was a genuine openness to talk without others around. I told her about a dream I had had of someone in her family cursing her, and then about my deliverance. She instantly relaxed more, to my surprise and relief, as if finally having been given permission to be honest. Under her breath she said, “Oh Maître. What have I done to deserve this?” She turned to me and said, “I always saw her as a bat.” That was when the story came out as I have previously recounted it.
The implications
No anxiety, because for everyone a path has been opened through their inner heart to the love of God that resists in peace the wilful intent of those who seek to cause harm. That Godly resistance comes from the ‘between’ of an appeal, which may even be without words, or may be of such simple words that the powerful impact seems out of proportion. But that impact is in proportion to the cosmological scale at which the Godly response of informational movement influences life processes. This occurs seemingly remotely, across time and space and regardless of the material forms of life that we perceive and may believe constitute our environment here and now.
The implications of this experience are profound, but not scary. In fact, for a scientist they are exciting, because they open an agenda for ‘research’ that will contribute to a life-enhancing paradigm shift in thinking and living. It is time to let go of pure, exclusive materialism, and turn instead to welcome a relational reality that diversifies and transforms.
The age of materialistic science started with Galileo’s observations of the moon’s movement. It received royal assent in Britain when King Charles II gave a charter founding the Royal Society of London to research truth by experiments. The honourable purpose of this charter had been to outmanoeuvre charlatans who were deceiving people with superstitions, which is still its declared purpose of the Royal Society in promoting experimental science. However, materialism is not a necessary interpretation of the experimental findings. As I explain in my book Clearing a Way: Unveiling the Mental Tricks that Hide Reality, it is a cognitive side effect of adopting an Observer analytical viewpoint on life, rather than participating wholeheartedly in life.
Two other primary analytical perspectives on life can be adopted by the attention-focusing brain, vitalism (a life force), and a computational view of informationism (virtual reality). These generate vastly different worldviews and value systems that affect the qualities of relatedness between people (and our wider earthed ecology). These three perspectives are all equally valid to understand features of life. They can be integrated into a richly fulfilling conversational consciousness, one that wholeheartedly draws the person to participate assertively in the somewhat unpredictable flow of truth and grace that we call life. We become co-creators of life’s movements with God, however you understand God to be. Personally, I see God as a process of intelligent love holding all processes creatively together. Given half a chance, that intelligent love flooded me and liberated me, for which I am grateful.
